Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS)
Hosted glue for wiring SaaS apps together with triggers and actions, so nobody has to write and host the integration code.
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What it is
An iPaaS is hosted glue. Instead of writing, deploying, and babysitting your own integration code, you pick a trigger in one app ('new row in Airtable'), map its fields onto an action in another ('create Stripe customer'), and the platform runs it forever. Zapier, Make, n8n, Workato, and Tray all sell the same shape, differing mostly in how much branching, code, and self-hosting they let you do.
Reach for it when the integration is the product's plumbing, not the product: internal ops handoffs, lead routing, notifications, keeping two vendor tools roughly in sync. It buys you connectors, OAuth handling, retries, and run logs on day one, which is weeks of work you would otherwise write yourself. It stops paying off once the logic grows real branching, real data volume, or real correctness requirements.
Gotcha: iPaaS pricing is per task or per operation, so a chatty workflow gets expensive fast, and a paused or silently failing zap is the classic 3am mystery ('the leads stopped arriving on Tuesday'). Anything that moves money or must not lose records deserves alerting on failed runs, not just trust in the dashboard.
Ask AI for it
Build this specifically as an n8n workflow and return importable workflow JSON, not a description of one. Include named nodes for the trigger (state whether it fires on a webhook or a polling interval), a filter that ends runs that should not continue, a mapping node that sets every action input field by field from the trigger payload including formats and defaults for missing values, the action steps in order, a deduplication step keyed on a stable ID so replayed triggers do not create duplicate records, retry settings on each node that calls an external API, and an error path that posts failed runs to Slack with the payload attached. Use credential placeholders instead of real secrets, and add setup notes covering every value I have to fill in myself.